The Hostage-Taking Chess Strategy
Hostage-taking in real life is when a cornered or retreating opponent suddenly takes an unsuspecting victim at gun point to make escape more feasible. A strategy dubbed "hostage-taking" chess tactic is somewhat the same.
Sometimes we find our major or minor piece about to be trapped. For instance, we have our knight doing several capturing feat right inside enemy territory. This would surely incur vengeance and we would find the enemy trying hard to trap our piece. When it is trapped or almost trapped and there's no reinforcement we can send out to rescue the piece directly, we may resort to hostage-taking somewhere else on the board.
For instance, we may find the enemy queen susceptible to check or have an enemy knight or bishop or rook checked by a pawn. The trick is to find an enemy piece at least equal to our piece being pursued by the opponent, or something higher in rank. The tendency of the enemy is to stop pursuit and save the higher official. If the enemy allows us to capture the enemy knight or bishop, then we may rest assured and allow the opponent to vent vengeance on our escaping knight. After the capturing spree above, we'd still be ahead even if the enemy takes our knight.
Thus, the hostage-taking chess tactic is a checking diversion to buy time for our escaping piece or to break-even when our escaping piece has nowhere else to run. The principle is that there must be an enemy official available for checking that is higher in rank than the object of the enemy manhunt. The farther away the hostage-taking is from our escaping piece the better. This is to make sure that enemy focus is really diverted.
This strategy can also be used to help our king or queen escape from an impending checkmate. If our king is about to be checkmate, we may divert attention by checking the enemy king unrelentingly. These consecutive checks to the enemy king may not result to an immediate checkmate, but it may eventually. But the goal here is the immediate outcome—and that is to divert attention or frustrate or delay a checkmate against us.
The same with rescuing an imperiled queen. We must quickly find a way to hold the enemy king hostage for a while. And who knows, the hostage-taking may result to a successful checkmate?
Hostage-taking chess tactic is a devious way of turning the table on the enemy. It is a strategy worth learning.
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